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understaffed, hammered by budget constraints, and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of legitimate complaints, Mayhew decided that his experienced caseworkers would be just the ticket to separate the wheat from the chaff among the complaints and thereby improve the efficiency of the CPS as a whole.
    Mayhew’s plan was as obvious as it was simple. From his point of view, I wasn’t a team player, Bettina was a candidate for rehab, and Lionel was useless. If he could keep me off the street, I’d probably quit before too long. And without me holding down the fort on the false complaints, Bettina and Lionel would both screw up eventually if not sooner, clearing not just one but three caseworker spots. Mayhew could then make three of his wealthy friends happy and maybe get himself a new car—or at least another silver samovar or photo op with a famous person.
    But truly outraged now, I would be damned if I was going to let myself be so easily ousted from a career I cared about. I figured I could outlast Mayhew. He needed good, solid caseworkers or he would begin to look bad from the outside. I figured it would be a waiting game, and I’d play it until the worm turned, then I would get assigned back to the street. And thereby win.

    Wrong.
    Late one Friday afternoon in February, alone at my cubicle—both Bettina and Lionel gone AWOL earlier in the day—with a stack of complaints that needed to be evaluated before the weekend in front of me, I fielded a mandated report from the emergency room at San Francisco General Hospital. A five-year-old Hispanic boy, Miguel Nunoz, had been admitted at a little before two o’clock that afternoon with a broken arm that struck hospital officials as unusual. I called the admitting station and talked to a Dr. Turner, who had discovered that this was the boy’s third admission to three different hospitals—two broken bones and a dislocated shoulder—since his mother had taken up with a new boyfriend. Now they had casted the arm, and the mother was, even as we spoke, waiting to take Miguel home, but Turner thought somebody from CPS ought to get out there and talk to both the mom and her son and evaluate the situation before the doctor would feel comfortable releasing the boy back into his mother’s custody.
    I tended to agree.
    Willa Cardoza and Jim Freed were just coming in for the swing shift. Inseparable, both were new hires within the past two years, which meant they were Mayhew’s people. I’d never before had anything but professional interactions with either of them, and while not exactly gung ho, they showed up to work every day and seemed okay. At least, apparently, they went out on calls, filed decent reports, did the minimum. I also didn’t know at the time—I was not a supervisor and so had no access to worker files—that neither of them had yet had to pull the trigger, i.e., forcibly remove a child from a parent’s custody.
    Nevertheless, they were the best, not to say only, choice at hand. My job was to evaluate the legitimacy of the complaint, and this one was no doubt as real as a heart attack. So I gave them the quick synopsis and told them they’d better hustle, the mom was sitting in the waiting room, anxious to take the boy home, and Dr. Turner wasn’t going to be able to stall her forever.
    By the time they left and I’d finished the last of my pile of evaluations, it was close to seven o’clock. Still concerned about the seriousness of the complaint, I swallowed my bile and went up to see if Mayhew was still in his office. His secretary had gone home, but he was there, drinking what looked like brandy in a snifter, talking to someone on the telephone. He made a fast excuse and hung up when he saw me in his doorway. It was my first audience with him since I’d turned down the promotion.
    â€œYes, Hunt, what is it?”
    I’d been Hunt, not Wyatt, since the day. I briefed him on Miguel,